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Climate Change

Two years ago, the governments of the world unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a remarkable blueprint of the world’s most pressing long-term predicaments that the United Nations is good at lifting into the global conscience. Cataloguing 17 goals and 169 targets, the agenda contains an inventory of the remedial activities that...

When Donald Trump, defying science and public opinion, reversed American policy and announced in June that the United States would leave the universally endorsed 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, his decision may have given more impetus to a growing trend away from reliance on shortsighted national politicians. In country after country, the focus...

With his announcement to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump will discover taking such action is neither simple nor immediate. Given that the US is one of the leading greenhouse gas emitting countries, pulling out of the Paris accord will make it incredibly difficult for the world to...

“Allow me to be blunt,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, told his audience to an uneasy laugh. “Our world is in a mess.” Although Guterres could have been speaking to any audience anywhere, he was addressing a crowd gathered at the Stern Center for Sustainable Business at New York University on May 30,...

The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, which came into force in 2016, commits nearly every nation in the world to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, a first major step toward global consensus and cooperation on combating climate change after years of United Nations-led negotiations. But environmental scientists have moved on, asking this question: What...

Is the planet full? And how many plates are empty? These are the first two questions that came to my mind from the title of Lester R. Brown‘s new book, “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.” With world population now standing at 7.1 billion and projected to exceed 9.3 billion...